Knitting, Sewing, Crocheting. Mostly.

Since this week is Spring Break, I went to the library last Friday to celebrate. I picked up a couple of knitting pattern books to peruse and found a nifty book on embellishing, which I’ve been unabashedly stealing ideas from. The Westlake Library has the biggest knitting section I’ve ever seen in a library! I knew I’d hit the jack pot when I walked in there about a year ago, and the collection just keeps growing. Someone on staff must be a knitter.

I finally started my Zephyr tree jacket:

I’ve had the pattern for probably two years now and bought yarn before Christmas. I’m working the pattern in Lion Brand Cotton and the result is snuggly soft, easy to work with, and so far, right on gauge.

Dom’s crochet scarf has come along nicely. I decided to edge it in a complementing green wool (same brand) that I originally purchased for my father’s belated Christmas gift. Dad will get a scarf too sometime this year with the remaining green and maybe some other colors I can whip up out of stash.

Our anniversary shares a special date with St. Patrick’s memory, so my husband and I took a nice “trip” around our house and did whatever we wanted for about three days. What I wanted included sitting around at Epoch coffeehouse and falling inside Blue Velvet, the vintage store next door (it really was kind of coincidental – Blue Velvet’s been around since I was in high school, but they’ve moved locations several times and just recently moved in next to Epoch). I found a nicely finished red seventies dress with some bright red lace trimming the sleeves and bodice – it’s good to go and I wore it to work on Thursday. I also found a couple of project items.

The first is a dress that was handsewn by somebody years ago and fits me perfectly. I took a look for a tag and discovered handsewn finishing up at the top of the zipper (and no tag). Whoever made this dress did great zippers – better than mine, that’s for sure! I didn’t think to take a picture of the item before I started seam ripping, so the “before” photo only has one sleeve. The bodice and skirt of the dress are great – but those big puffy lacy sleeves have got to go!

The second item was an extra large skirt with some cute embroidered flowers in several bright colors. The skirt itself was in bad shape – seams and elastic going – but the fabric decorating the bottom is great. One of the suggestions of the embellishing book is to use old embroidery from items that are too beat up to wear and add it to things that you do want to wear (hey, it’s a lot faster than embroidering the whole theme yourself!). I like it. Once I figure out what to do with the raw materials, I’ll post a photo of the transformation.

As promised, a few pictures of things I’ve been working on – and I’m playing with the collage maker on my Picasa software, so apologies for my dorky “artistic” attempts! I’ve never been good with visual composition, which is sad since I long had aspirations as a painter – in fact, the first 18 years of my life were spent with the expectation that painting would be my eventual career. No worries; I still paint for fun. 🙂

Here’s my braided hat, taken from Lion Brand Yarn’s free pattern set:

Warm and cozy!

And next, my fingerless gloves that I totally adore… the only problem is that the gray really lends itself to a “homeless chic” kind of look when I wear them with long sleeves. With short sleeves on, they look much more fashionable. I need to make some new ones in a brighter color, but at the time, I was trying out the pattern on scrap yarn and didn’t expect the result to turn out so well. This is the pattern that taught me to cable – “Dashing”, which you can find on the Knitty website:

Hope that collage works!

A couple other things I’ve been working on:

First is curtains for the kitchen – just long sheets of muslin and some fun quilting squares I cut into pieces and patched onto the muslin. I need to iron the finished product and trim loose strings, then I’ll put a final picture up of them hanging in our kitchenette area. As you can see, Antigone was quite eager to help on this project (I edited out the picture in which she sits on my lap in the middle of working the sewing machine).

Last, I’m working on a scarf for my brother-in-law, Dom. He’s tall, thin, English, and wears a brown fedora, so I’m hoping a manly crocheted scarf will suit. Amusingly, the yarn I picked from knitpicks.com is Fedora, one of their Wool of the Andes line. I started by working the crochet width-wise (typical) but kind of got bored and didn’t get the result I wanted from playing around with different crochet stitches. So I am working it length-wise, which is proving an interesting change, and I’ve been able to utilize a V-stitch pattern down one row, which is the holey part you can see in what is currently the center of the scarf. I decided to do only one V-stitch row, and to leave it off center. Once I’ve completed a few more rows, it will look a bit more asymmetrical.